Good customer relationship management

We decided to do a night in tonight, so I went to the Blockbuster at the bottom of the hill for the first time. This in and of itself wasn’t so amazing. What was amazing was:

I had my old membership card, originally gotten in the late 1980s in Newport News, VA, in my wallet, and subsequently added to membership databases in Charlottesville and Fairfax;

The clerk was able to use the global Blockbuster customer database to import me into the store’s local customer database with a single scan of that card, despite the fact that I hadn’t used the card since sometime in 1995.